Efficient Packaging Designs: How It Can Help Marketplaces
In today’s competitive market, businesses constantly seek ways to stand out and capture consumers’ attention. Among the myriad of strategies, packaging design is a vital aspect to win over customers.
Your packaging is not merely a vessel for your products but also a powerful marketing tool that can significantly influence your customers’ perceptions, purchasing decisions, and brand loyalty. In a digitally saturated era where marketplaces thrive, efficient packaging designs play an even more vital role in attracting and retaining your customers.
What is efficient packaging?
Firstly, efficient packaging protects your product. Have you ever received oversized packaging with your product flopping about inside? An efficient packaging design has no wasted space, protecting your product and preserving its intended features and integrity.
Secondly, efficient packaging is convenient. It offers a well-thought-out design where every element serves to enhance the quality of your product. The unboxing experience becomes a part of your product experience.
Thirdly, efficient packaging is sustainable. Some of our environment’s sustainable nightmares are unrecyclable and toxic materials as well as redundant layers of cardboard or oversized packaging with wasted spaces. With the world focusing on sustainability, businesses should adopt that direction as it can promote trust. If packaging from your marketplace increases environmental harm, it will cause trouble for customers who are getting more environmentally friendly every year.
So, how does efficient packaging benefit?
With a thoughtful design and smart solutions, your packaging’s efficiency can increase significantly. So, why should you adopt efficient packaging? Thanks to it, your marketplace should generate:
1. Less product waste
During delivery or transportation, your product will become unusable or go bad faster if the right conditions are not met. It is not just about being exposed to the sun, humidity, or temperature – your products need quality external packaging that will protect them. An efficient packaging minimises the strains they will have to endure.
2. Less packaging waste
Reducing the need for less packaging materials means less packaging waste that must undergo recycling and other waste processes. This can also mean reducing the amount of packaging raw material at the source which reduces the overall packaging weight, which we will talk about later.
When it comes to packaging materials, plastic, cardboard, and paper containers are some of the more common choices. Neither type of materials is 100% perfect. While plastic is hard to beat in terms of functionality, it seems they are interdependent on one another. Paper often requires an internal plastic coating for added support while plastic may require the use of paper labels.
Studies have shown that while cardboard and paper make up only a quarter of the waste generated, they account for two-thirds of recycled materials. On the other hand, plastics makeup 12 per cent of waste generated and only four per cent are recycled.
3. Lower costs
It all boils down to customisability and right-sizing. Rather than getting a one-size-fits-all packaging solution, getting a suitable-size packaging for your products can reduce packaging expenses significantly. By utilising efficient packaging designs, your material usage decreases significantly, meaning less costs.
So, how do you optimise efficient packaging designs for your marketplace?
There are three key elements you can consider when considering efficient packaging designs.
1. Packaging materials
There is a plethora of options that will help your business to achieve efficiency. You can divide packaging materials into various classifications, such as expensive and cheap, non-transparent and transparent, as well as heavy and lightweight. However, you can take it a step further by looking at the below-mentioned considerations:
Reusable and recyclable materials: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and Polypropylene (PP) packaging is 100% reusable and recyclable when properly cleaned and disposed. And that is a great benefit as those packaging can be repurposed by your customers or simply thrown into the recycling bin. At the end of the day, your customers should also take into account the overall recyclability of the product and waste management system in their country.
Compostable and biodegradable materials: Does biodegradable materials mean that they have to be plastic-free? While cardboard and paper food packaging is essentially plastic-free and biodegradable, SKP offers a line of biodegradable plastic products called EcoVue. Using the latest environmentally-friendly technology, BioTransformation, all EcoVue’s products are 100% biodegradable, breaking down into organic elements without leaving behind any plastic waste.
Unsustainable materials: Unsustainable packaging materials are every type of material that cannot be composted, biodegraded, or recycled, such as PE-coated papers, cling films, expanded polystyrenes, or Styrofoam. Unfortunately, many marketplaces utilise such packaging materials to fill up spaces and save costs.
2. Packaging size and shapes
A more streamlined size and shape of your packaging is also worth considering, as it can help reduce costs, too. Ensure that you choose packaging that does not waste any space and contains your product perfectly.
3. Packaging weight
There is more than one reason to go for smaller and lighter packaging designs: shipping prices, added protection, streamlined storage, and easier handling. Here at SKP, our new machines produce packaging products that are not only more energy efficient, reducing our carbon footprint, but also lightweight; at least 15 to 20 per cent lighter yet do not compromise on functionality.
Conclusion
An efficient packaging is one that does not go over the budget and is sustainable, convenient, and functional. By considering the abovementioned points, you are able to achieve a packaging design that is efficient.
Here at SKP, we offer more than just quality food packaging. We offer solutions that are robust, sustainable, innovative, and customisable. Contact us to achieve an efficient packaging design.